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THE NEW YORKER, JULY 22, 2013
male egos stage themselves: they know
that, in some odd combination of re-
spect and revenge, they are turning
their fathers into novelistic characters.
We see William Styron, almost in-
sanely ambitious to write the next Big
Book, teasing his daughter with his
rather sadistic humor, and bursting
into petty rages: "Avoiding my father's
wrath was a complicated business. . . .
His rage could be almost laughable---I
once saw him curse, chew apart, and
hurl across the room a pencil that had
the gall to lose its point---or it could be
unexpectedly frightening." Styron no-
tices that she became invisible during
the day, while her father was working:
"He might wander into the kitchen, or
pass you while walking his dogs around
West Chop"---on Martha's Vineyard.
"But he wasn't exactly there. . . . In the
evening hours, however, his humanity
usually made a swim for the surface."
Malamud Smith writes, "Dad was not
openly domineering in his requests, but
he assumed a prerogative." Her mother
"rigorously downplayed her own abili-
ties," and acquiesced in the shared mar-
ital understanding that "my mother's la-
bors were necessary but inconsequent,
while my father's work mattered. He
wrote; she typed his drafts."
But the cold eye of these adult chil-
dren is cast in the service of a warmer,
more comprehensive vision. As writers
themselves, they understand the neces-
sities and the inequalities of talent. The
men wrote the books, but it doesn't fol-
low that in doing so they stole unwrit-
ten books from their wives. All three
write movingly about the holy central-
ity of writing in their fathers' lives. Sty-
ron is devastatingly honest about it:
"But if each creation is, in effect, an art-
ist's offspring, I think Daddy put his
nonfiction in the category with his four,
living, breathing children. There was
affection for what he'd made and, fre-
quently, pride. But the Novel owned
his heart."
The great scandal, you could say, is
not that these men were writers first
and husbands and fathers second but
that they arranged their lives in such
conventional ways that they kept on
choosing, and ceaselessly inflicted that
choosing on their familial audiences.
How, really, could the drama of pater-
nity have competed with the drama of
creativity? For a man, creating a child---
though certainly not raising one---is al-
most accidental, whereas writing a book
takes years of thought and effort. Or
put it another way: raising a child can
seem as ordinary, as continuous, and as
"easy" as life itself, while writing a book
is like staying up all night. Or yet an-
other way: few sixteen-year-old boys
dream of being a father, yet every good
writer spent his or her teen-age years
dreaming of being a writer, plotting
how to become one, rehearsing and
practicing, fantasizing and preparing. It
is part of the poignancy and psychic
healthiness of these memoirs that each
writer understands this about her fa-
ther. "Each phase of my youth is joined
in my mind to the novel my father was
writing at the time," Styron writes.
Malamud Smith recalls, as a little girl,
hearing her father shaving in the bath-
room, and "announcing to all within
range, firmly, audibly, 'Someday I'm
going to win.' " More simply, Susan
Cheever seems to measure the effort of
will involved in any serious creative act,
when she writes, "It had taken my fa-
ther twenty-five years to publish a novel
and two collections of short stories."
For a number of reasons, Greg Bel-
low's book, "Saul Bellow's Heart: A
Son's Memoir" (Bloomsbury), does not
belong in the same company as the por-
traits by Styron, Cheever, and Malamud
Smith. (This despite the fact that Bel-
low tells us that he gained the courage
to write his book after talking to Mal-
amud Smith.) It covers similar terrain
but dies amid the difficult landscape. It
is a hard book to read, and even harder
to write about, because it is really a
child's complaint, with much unfinished
business. It is less a memoir than a
speaking wound---and understandably,
because Greg Bellow was eight years old
when his father told him that he and
Greg's mother were separating. After
that, Greg seems to have been only
fitfully involved in his father's life. Fa-
ther and son were sitting on a bench in
Central Park when the news was deliv-
ered. It is one of the most affecting
scenes in the book:
I responded by making a snowball and
letting y at a nearby pigeon. What I really
wished for was the courage to hit my father
with the snowball. Under the childhood
anger my father expected and hoped to see
was sadness born of losing the parent who
understood me best. At eight, I felt like a
deep-sea diver cut off from my air supply.
At sixty-nine, Greg Bellow is still the
drowning deep-sea diver; this book is
his flailing. The tone is sometimes de-
terminedly wistful, as if he were con-
vincing himself of the special bond that
existed between father and son, and
sometimes angry, because his father's
behavior put that bond into question:
Every other weekend and for one summer
month I had emotionally sustaining visits
with Saul that I tried desperately to prolong
but that ended in sadness at being away from
the person who was essentially my best
friend. . . . He was often late and sometimes
did not show up at all.
Styron, Cheever, and Malamud
Smith wrote books about complicated,
sometimes monstrously selfish fathers
who stuck around. "They stayed married
for more than forty years---a constancy
that seemed alternately noble and ludi-
crous," Susan Cheever writes of her par-
ents. Greg Bellow, a psychotherapist, has
written a book about a complicated father
who left, and the difference is indeed
wounding. The children whose fathers
remained married to their mothers have
learned, paradoxically, how to let go of
their dead fathers; they understand that
their fathers had literary existences that
were religiously absorbing, selfishly in-
dependent. To bestow on one's parents
their independence is also to announce
one's own independence from them. (It
is a signal strength of "Experience," Mar-
tin Amis's vivacious memoir of Kingsley
Amis: the son, confident in his own liter-
ary powers, grants his father an equiva-
lent liberty.) Greg Bellow, by contrast, is
still clutching his father, and clutching for
his father. He seems to struggle with re-
sentment at the very idea of Saul Bellow's
having an independent literary existence;
which is to say that he finds it hard to
credit that his father was a writer at all.
Terribly, he appears not quite to know
this about himself. So he constructs nar-
ratives that are plausible only to him. The
unconvincing arc of the book is that he
had been carrying a lot of anger toward
his father; that this was stirred up again
by his father's death and the insensitive
way that the literary world claimed its
champion; but that in rereading all of
Bellow's novels ("in temporal sequence as